The Joys of Being Right
by Sarah1281
Summary: Sally Donovan was, against all odds, right about Sherlock. She had been waiting for this day and thought it'd never come. She should be happy, she should be horrified, she should be...in the end, he was just a lunatic and always let you down. Post-Season2


The Joys of Being Right

Disclaimer: I do not own Sherlock.

Note: Contains heavy spoilers for The Reichenbach Fall.

Sally Donovan would have liked to have been able to say that she had known from the moment she laid eyes on Sherlock Holmes that one day he'd put a body in the ground to ease his all too frequent boredom. As it happened, that was the story she told people.

It wasn't the truth, though.

The first time she had seen him was towards the end of her second week at her present position. She had vaguely noticed him approaching the crime scene but hadn't thought anything of it. After all, it was a pretty common reaction for people to congregate around police tape. Most people just stood there watching for only a few minutes before heading off.

Sally would sooner die than consciously admit the stray 'cute' that passed through her head.

While she might have been new to that particular position it was hardly the beginning of her career as a copper so she had seen her fair share of crime scene crowds. That was why she was surprised when not only did the bloke wearing a long coat and scarf way out of season duck under the crime scene tape but Lestrade greeted him with fond tolerance.

Her immediate impression after that was surprisingly favorable as he quickly gave them a great deal of information about their unidentified victim that ultimately allowed them to find the killer. She had thought that he must have known the man or something, maybe been hired to do a bit of digging into his past.

Of course, before Sherlock had left the scene he had managed to ruin it and set the tone for their future relationship.

He barely glanced at it after he finished rattling off his fancy deductions and the first words he ever spoke to her were so bloody typical that she knew that this was not a nice man and certainly not a normal one.

"You know that Anderson's married," he had said, his words not quite a question. "I find that affairs rarely end well and are only complicated in a workplace."

There was something altogether disturbing and, dare she say it, _freakish_ about someone who could look at her – **would** look at her – and tell her that.

Of course Sally knew that Anderson was married. Yeah he had said something about leaving his wife the night before but she wasn't stupid and she knew that he wasn't going to and if he ever did it wouldn't be for her. It was only the one time but it might happen again and she was an adult and shouldn't have to justify herself to this…freak! _Especially _not at a crime scene!

To make matters worse, no one outside of Anderson and herself had known about their tryst and now they all did. And they were all judging her. They didn't say anything but she could feel it.

Her mother would have said it was a guilty conscience but Sally was pretty sure that it was judgment.

Lestrade had taken her aside afterwards and apologized on Sherlock's behalf. He admitted that yes he was always like that but claimed that he was good enough to make putting up with him worth it. He also said that he had actually been trying to give her some helpful advice and not intending to mortify her but Sally couldn't believe that anyone would be so thick. Lestrade always did like to see the best in people and he was convinced that he needed Sherlock to boot so extra allowances needed to be made.

It was always the same after that.

Sherlock strode in to the crime scene, whether he had been summoned or not, acting like he owned the place and insulting everything and everyone in his sight.

He never apologized for what he said and on a few notable occasions he had readdressed her fling with Anderson.

Right. He was definitely trying to help her.

He was always alone which wasn't at all a surprise given that he was, well, Sherlock Holmes. She wouldn't have been surprised to learn that they were the closest people in the world to him.

And then one day he wasn't alone anymore and he never was alone again.

Some army bloke called John Watson who had just met him if the slightly shell-shocked look on his face was any indication. John was called upon to aid in Sherlock's endless quest to make them all look stupid (how he thought this would help him in any way was beyond her) but though he was quite clearly dragged to the scene by Sherlock he was also promptly abandoned there when Sherlock went off in search of "PINK!"

He seemed like a nice enough guy who had somehow gotten caught up in Hurricane Holmes and he just looked so pathetic standing there asking about a taxi while trying to keep weight off of his bad leg that she tried to warn him.

She didn't think he'd really _need_ a warning from her in the long run because he'd work it out for himself but since he hadn't seemed to get the picture yet (though everyone else had within their first fifteen minutes of meeting him) she figured she might as well save him some time and just open his eyes to the truth about Sherlock Holmes.

He was a freak, plain and simple.

Sally could admit that she was never going to be happy about an amateur – which he was, no matter what he might have to say about it – mucking about in official police business when all he had to do was show up and she had to claw her way up the ranks. Still, if he hadn't been such a…

But he was.

And that wasn't all.

Sally had gotten into this because she had seen too much injustice when she'd been young and been powerless to stop it. Her family wasn't particularly dysfunctional nor were they associated with any criminal elements but they did live in a rather dodgy part of town and she wasn't blind to what went on around her.

She, like most of her fellows, just wanted to help people.

The freak? Well, he seemed to really get off on it. It sounded morbid, true, and twisted but she couldn't think of any other way to describe the sickening glee on his face whenever a body turned up. He regularly applauded criminal 'genius' and sometimes showed up at the Yard to complain how boring it was and lament that there wasn't a serial killer running loose or something.

His clear disappointment with what anyone else – anyone _sane_ – would see as an ideal was bad enough but at least it was harmless if distasteful.

What did a man like Sherlock Holmes do to stave off his boredom?

Well, he bothered them, of course. Bothered the people down at St. Barts. Probably bothered everyone else he knew. But what aside from that? He must have some hobbies though Sally was quite sure that she was happier not thinking about what kind of hobbies a man like _that_ might have.

It took so very little to bore him, though. So _freakishly_ little. Eating bored him. Sleeping bored him. Casual conversation bored him. Explaining things bored him. Murder scenes bored him half the time if they weren't 'inventive' enough.

Sally couldn't even begin to explain it but it worried her.

What did a man like Sherlock Holmes do to relieve his boredom? What _would_ he do?

He always talked like he was smarter than anyone else and he was always searching for that one perfect crime, like a present he couldn't wait to unravel instead of the horrific tragedy that it usually was.

It all started as a stray thought one day as she watched him practically giggling to himself over a murdered three-year-old.

_Dear God_, she had thought disgustedly, _one day he's going to be laughing over his own work_.

She had tried to dismiss the thought, she really had.

After all, Sherlock Holmes – detestable or not – _was_ a proper genius and who knew the kind of damage he could do before he was caught? _If_ he was ever caught.

Sally found herself watching him a lot closer from then on, always wondering when that day would come or if it already had and they'd never known, instead trusting the word of a potential killer and arresting some poor innocent bastard.

John Watson hadn't seemed to believe her and, against all odds, he'd stayed. Sally thought he must have been a bit mental himself but she thought she did sort of understand. He needed a hobby, too, and at least his wasn't ever going to be murder.

No, she hadn't known how very wrong Sherlock was from the first but she'd been wondering about him for so very long that she'd almost allowed herself to believe that that day might never come. Almost let herself hope that maybe John and his adoration and his blog and their rising fame might be enough to stave off the boredom.

Oh, but it wasn't. Far from it. And yet, at the same time, it sort of was.

It was all orchestrated, apparently, by a desperately bored Sherlock looking to find some way to amuse himself.

Sally had seen firsthand the effects of drugs on the neighborhood junkies and so she never thought she'd be thinking it but she really wished Sherlock would have just gone back on drugs instead. It was a horrible thing to say but it didn't hold a candle to his sober boredom reliever.

That _lunatic_ had hired a man to pretend to be his great intellectual equal and opposite, the devil to his angel. But of course he had never been an angel, had he? Not even a fallen one. And now that man was dead. It looked like a suicide but surely the great Sherlock Holmes could fake a suicide. And even if it was one, what did that mean? That cabbie had forced people to commit suicide, why not Sherlock? Or maybe he just couldn't live with the guilt even though he hadn't been the one arranging or actually committing those crimes.

Sally wasn't sure she could have handled the guilt either.

Before she shared her suspicions with anyone else, she had let Sherlock in on them, more or less, when she complimented his work for the first time ever and told him that it was unbelievable. He had to have noticed and she had given him the perfect opportunity to explain how he _really_ knew or why that little girl was so terrified of him.

He just brushed her off.

Well, he'd had his chance.

The newspaper had called him a fake but she knew that that wasn't true, not completely. He may have invented a great many of the puzzles he was called upon to solve but at the very least he had a gift for details.

She went to Lestrade and then Anderson and then the both of them had gone back to Lestrade and slowly but surely forced him to consider that their ace in the hole might not have been such a blessing as Lestrade thought he was.

He wouldn't come down for questioning. That made him look innocent.

He took John Watson 'hostage' and stole a gun to flee his own arrest. Yes, the ambiguity of their decision continued to startled her.

And now there was a dead body on the roof of St. Barts and Sherlock himself had apparently flung himself off of that same roof in clear sight of his supposed only friend in the world.

It wasn't like she hadn't known this day was coming. She had been expecting it from nearly the first. She had been the one to cotton on to his guilt in the first place.

Sherlock Holmes had kidnapped two small children and he had tortured them. He had killed them by inches with mercury-laced candy as they tried to stop themselves from starving to death.

Forget freak.

What kind of _monster_ was capable of something like that?

In a way, she was glad that he was dead. Yes, it meant no court case and no chance for justice but it was just easier for everyone.

She felt sorry for Lestrade who had believed so deeply in him and who was sure to face some heat for enabling this monster. She felt worse for John who had believed in deeper and who was left with nothing now.

Sally Donovan was vindicated after all years of being told to stop imagining things and to make nice with Sherlock so they could get their work done. She was right after even Anderson had started to think that maybe he wasn't quite killer material.

She had had an instinct and stuck with it and proved she wasn't such an idiot after all when she was the one to catch the great Sherlock Holmes.

And all she could think was how desperately she wanted to be wrong.

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